1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates generally to network-based support activities.
2. Background of the Related Art
In the course of providing customer support for software products (e.g., debugging, or maintaining critical infrastructure), customers must often must send artifacts to service or software providers. In situations where the infrastructure may contain regulated data, e.g., HIPAA, tight controls must exist to ensure that the information is not disseminated beyond fully-qualified and trained support engineers. The working artifacts thus must be protected in transit, while in review, and in use, until such time as it can be assured that they are destroyed. Since the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) was enacted in 2009, industry has struggled to maintain compliance. There are many industry-standard methods for the secure transit of files, but these methods only protect the working artifacts while in transit, and they provide no protection once the artifacts arrive in the service provider's environment. To address this problem, many companies opt to create virtual private networks (VPNs) to allow the service provider to work within the customer's environment, but this solution opens up that environment to potential compromise, and it does not prevent unintended disclosure or exposure to only required artifacts. The problem is further exacerbated if the customer requires that all work be done on the customer's own assets, which may not include the full suite of debugging tools often required by support engineers. As a stop-gap solution, support engineers often go on-site to the customer environment to debug issues, but this is an expensive, non-scalable solution.